Neighbor

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As soon as I came of age, I escaped to the anonymity of city life, but something of the old suburban paranoia endures within, and I find myself compulsively speculating about the lives of my neighbors. Neighbors are different in the city, though. They live in your building, you see them by the mailboxes in the hall, but you rarely exchange more than brief greetings before shuffling back into the cramped seclusion of your apartment. There’s little opportunity for gossip and since no one knows anyone else, there’s nothing to gossip about.

I have moved many times, and I’ve had many neighbors who’ve occupied my thoughts. I find every neighbor as mysterious as an uncracked nut. I wonder about their enigmatic comings and goings. I wonder about the odd noises and unpleasant smells that issue from their apartments. I have lingered in the corridors, and I have pressed my ears against the walls, but I never figure anything out.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the pretty Chinese girl who lives in the apartment above me. Since there’s no intercom system for the building, she has one of those remote-control buzzers you can buy at Radio Shack. It’s a little doorbell-like thing that is supposed to be attached near the entrance of the building, and when you press the button, it rings a wireless speaker upstairs. But the buzzer keeps falling off. Nearly every day, it seems, I go outside and find it lying on the sidewalk like a squashed insect. I bring it inside and set it on the mail table in the foyer. Usually, by the next morning, I’ll see that she’s stuck it back to the doorframe. By the afternoon, though, I’ll notice that it’s fallen to the ground again. On the doorframe itself, I often see evidence of her attempts to fasten it securely: scotch tape, masking tape, blotches of dried glue.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty about bringing it back inside. I suspect that she subconsciously prefers to having it lying on the ground since it winds up there so often. I try to think about the situation from her point of view: every morning she attaches the buzzer to the doorframe, and every evening she comes home to find it inside the building on the mail table. It must be very frustrating. Perhaps she doesn’t know that the buzzer falls off on its own. Perhaps she thinks that someone pulls it off, out of malice, and then brings it inside. But she can never be sure — does it fall off on its own, or is it being pulled off? Are her neighbors good Samaritans, who nobly rescue her faulty buzzer from the sidewalk, or are they petty vandals, who find a strange delight in making her life a little more miserable?

I imagine that this is why the Chinese girl is so shy when I pass her in the hall. She is in a constant state of uncertainty about the character of her neighbors.

The buzzer falls because she uses inferior materials to fasten it to the doorframe. She’s using the wrong type of glue. I think about buying a small bottle of superglue and leaving it on the mail table next to the buzzer. Then she would know that we, her neighbors, are good Samaritans, and not the petty vandals she sometimes suspects us of being.

But I don’t buy the superglue, because I can see where it will lead. I know the perversity of my soul. If she uses my superglue to fasten the buzzer to the frame, I know that then I will be tempted to yank it back off and lay it on the mail table in the foyer. The Chinese girl’s state of uncertainty will reach a fevered pitch. She will be in a kind of agnostic purgatory, in which she must either doubt the goodness of her neighbors or the power of superglue.

She looks so sweet and shy in the halls that I just can’t bring myself to plunge her into this sort of neurotic limbo.

I guess I’m just not that kind of neighbor.